Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication apparatus and a control method of the communication apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
Recently, there exists many portable devices represented by a smartphone, which have a wireless LAN function and communicate with another wireless LAN device. In addition, a relay function called tethering, with which a device itself operates as an access point (AP) of wireless LAN and thus operates as a modem to another communication apparatus, has become widespread. There is disclosed a system that causes a smartphone to serve as an external relay apparatus and causes a digital camera to perform authentication processing of a cloud service (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-39793).
In addition, Bluetooth® Low Energy (to be referred to as BLE hereinafter) that allows communication with lower power consumption as compared to wireless LAN or version 3.0 or earlier has been standardized as part of Bluetooth 4.0 specifications (see Bluetooth SIG, SPECIFICATION OF THE BLUETOOTH SYSTEM (ver. 4.0)). In recent years, a smartphone that supports the BLE communication function has also become widespread, and a communication apparatus (for example, wristwatch) that communicates with a relay apparatus using BLE also exists.
However, such a smartphone cannot always execute the relay function (for example, tethering function). There exists, for example, a smartphone that does not implement the relay function, or a smartphone that implements the relay function but cannot use it by settings of a network carrier. In some cases, when a smartphone is connected to another access point (AP) as a client of wireless LAN and is performing communication, the relay function cannot be executed simultaneously.
In the above-described related art, however, when a communication apparatus requests to start the relay function, whether a smartphone serving as an external relay apparatus can execute the relay function is not taken into consideration. For this reason, the communication apparatus requests the smartphone incapable of executing the relay function to start the relay function, resulting in unnecessary communication traffic.